Added a technique to produce a log of the REFERRING pages. That is, until now, you only knew what machine visited your page. Curious web developers want to know which pages or bookmarks refer to their masterpiece.

I accomplish this using a JAVASCRIPT that catches the referring URL, and logs it into a new Geo-counter database running in conjunction with a standard Geo-counter, so it will only catch/log when a Netscape 3 or MSIE 3 running JAVA hits your page.

REGISTERED USERS will see a new button at the bottom of the "INSPECT" for each registered counter called "Show me the JAVASCRIPT CODE to add the referring log to my page". All you have to do is press that button, and it'll show you the code you need to copy and paste into your web page.

Then, your &full report will give you an option to report those "referring URLS" that have you bookmarked/referenced/directly linked.

Moved logs around to fix disk space crunch.
Bowed to pressure, and blank out passwords on the housekeeping page.
Also changed the inspect button in the registration program, because the width of the web form "I" ("") was pretty thin for some browsers. There's now an Icon for "inspect":

A Disk drive crash had to be repaired by migrating the counters on the fly to a new volume. This occurred between 2pm and 5pm MST. Some data may be missing from this time period. Sorry about that. Shit happens.

Netscape's composer, along with other cookie-cutter web page builders have a nasty habit of re-writing script calls to gifs to the end-result of the gif call. That is, what used to be a call to the Geo-counter script has been turned into simply a number.gif, which is static, not dynamic.
They also tend to rewrite the ampersand used in cgi-scripts to separate parameters as "&amp;" -- Idiots.
Rewrite the line to call the Geo-counter script. And Growl at the idiocies of these so-called efficient, intelligent web editors.
See also: FAQ16

Moved ALL counters to an even faster machine - buzz.srv.ualberta.ca.
This machine is on Gigabit ethernet, and has a HUGE honkin hard drive.
NOTE: with an updated daemon, OS, and gif manipulation package, I've noticed a few counter gifs looked ugly/different (most notably, Medium-white had become completely transparent). If you notice any other strange looking counters, email me.

ALSO:

A few people were pointed directly at IP addresses, rather than 'www.ualberta.ca'. (129.128.76.54, 129.128.98.54, 129.128.98.71 and 129.128.76.53 for example) Let the lesson be: "don't point at IP addresses. When you do, you are tied to a machine -- if we ever change a machine, you lose the service. You should NEVER directly address an IP address for a service." Just change your incorrect calls back to "http://www.ualberta.ca/htbin/Geo-counter.gif?etc....." -- the way it should have been.

Frequently Asked Questions

Hey, Geo! I would like to install your program on my server. That way, you won't get the load from pages that I'm serving.

A 0:

I wrote this program back in 1995. I haven't spent too much time since 1996 doing work on it, and my main job now is NOT to write CGI scripts. I'm probably not going to be making major modifications to it, and that means I'm certainly not going to get it to a "release level" that I'd be comfortable in sharing with anyone.. There are several other good counters available on the internet that you can install on your server.